What is Amazon EKS?
Who uses Amazon EKS?
Amazon EKS Integrations
Why developers like Amazon EKS?
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon EKS in their tech stack.
Heroku was a decent choice to start a business, but at some point our platform was too big, too complex & too heterogenic, so Heroku started to be a constraint, not a benefit. First, we've started containerizing our apps with Docker to eliminate "works in my machine" syndrome & uniformize the environment setup. The first orchestration was composed with Docker Compose , but at some point it made sense to move it to Kubernetes. Fortunately, we've made a very good technical decision when starting our work with containers - all the container configuration & provisions HAD (since the beginning) to be done in code (Infrastructure as Code) - we've used Terraform & Ansible for that (correspondingly). This general trend of containerisation was accompanied by another, parallel & equally big project: migrating environments from Heroku to AWS: using Amazon EC2 , Amazon EKS, Amazon S3 & Amazon RDS.
We are moving all of our infrastructure to Amazon EKS on Kubernetes from our our Amazon EC2 hosts. This gives less management overhead, host security and networking and aides a lot of compliance headaches since it's a Serverless architecture.
We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.
We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator
process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.
The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.
Amazon EKS's Features
- Managed Kubernetes Control Plane - Amazon EKS provides a scalable and highly-available control plane that runs across multiple AWS availability zones.
- Security and Networking - Amazon EKS makes it easy to provide security for your Kubernetes clusters, with advanced features and integrations to AWS services and technology partner solutions.
- Logging - Amazon EKS is integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and AWS CloudTrail to provide visibility and audit history tracking of your cluster and user activity.
- Certified Conformant - Amazon EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant, so you can use all the existing plugins and tooling from the Kubernetes community.